ABOUT US

Arrate Hidalgo is an editor, literary translator, and writer working for
the visibility of queer and feminist speculative fiction in English and
Spanish. Her short fiction, poetry, essays, and translations have been
featured in zines, journals, and books including The WisCon Chronicles
9: Intersections and Alliances and Fae Visions of the
Mediterranean. She has been associate editor at Aqueduct Press since
2015.

Nisi's story collection Filter House (Aqueduct Press,
2008) won the James Tiptree Jr. Award. Since 1999 Shawl has reviewed
science fiction for the Seattle Times. She is coeditor of the
anthology Strange Matings: Octavia E. Butler, Science
Fiction, African American Voices, and Feminism, and editor
of WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity.

Timmi is a writer as well as an editor and the founder of
Aqueduct Press. Her short fiction has appeared on several Tiptree
Honor Lists as well as been a finalist for the Sturgeon and Nebula
Awards, and in 2010 her five-novel Marq'ssan Cycle received special
recognition from the Tiptree jury.

Kath has been involved in graphic design and production, both on
the job and as an activist, since she and Timmi worked with a team
organizing a four-day art event in 1987— Low Intensity Conflict
in El Salvador: High Intensity Laboratory Exposing the War. She
is one of the founding crew of Aqueduct Press and also been a copy
editor since 1995.

Mission Statement

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we live in the Cascadia subduction
zone. Massive, almost unimaginable earthquakes lurk in our past and loom
in our future. Frequently we experience “slow earthquakes” that move the
earth beneath us, imperceptible except through technology. Occasionally a
mountaintop blows, awing us with its power. The denser plate of oceanic
crust—the Juan de Fuca Plate—is being forced deep into the Earth's
interior beneath the North American continental plate in a process known
as subduction, andas the
plateencounters high temperatures and pressures that
partially melt solid rock, some of this newly formed magma rises toward
the Earth's surface to erupt, forming a chain of volcanoes above the
subduction zone (Brantley,1994, Volcanoes of the United
States).Humans like to think of the earth as the ultimate symbol of
stability: hence the cliché “down-to-earth.” But in the Cascadia
subduction zone, “down-to-earth” necessarily means something else. To be
grounded, here, is to be ever mindful of the plates shifting below us,
slipping and striking and moving magma, of sloping fault lines that
separate and yet merge, of one plate being inexorably pushed beneath
another, with enormous consequences.

The Cascadia Subduction Zone aims to bring reviews, criticism, interviews, intelligent essays, and flashes of creative artwork (visual and written) to a readership hungry for discussion of work by not only men but also women. Work by women continually receives short shrift in most review publications. And yet the majority of readers are women. Ron Hogan writes in an August 2010 post on Beatrice.com, “[Jennifer] Weiner and [Jodi] Picoult, among others, are giving us a valuable critique of a serious problem with the way the [New York] Times [Book Review]—and, frankly, most of the so-called literary establishment—treats contemporary fiction. Which is to say: They ignore most of it, and when it comes to the narrow bandwidth of literature they do cover, their performance is underwhelming, ‘not only meager but shockingly mediocre,’ as former LA Times Book Review director Steve Wasserman said three years ago. And it hasn’t gotten any better since then, leaving us with what Jennifer Weiner describes as “a disease that’s rotting the relationship between readers and reviewers.”

The relationship between readers and reviewers interests us. We want to bring attention to work critics largely ignore and offer a wider, less narrowly conceived view of the literary sphere. In short, we will review work that interests us, regardless of its genre or the gender of its author. We will blur the boundaries between critical analysis, review, poetry, fiction, and visual arts. And we will do our best to offer our readers a forum for discussion that takes the work of women as vital and central rather than marginal. What we see, what we talk about, and how we talk about it matters. Seeing, recognizing, and understanding is what makes the world we live in. And the world we live in is, itself, a sort of subduction zone writ large. Pretending that the literary world has not changed and is not changing is like telling oneself that Earth is a solid, eternally stable ball of rock.